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Karen Read’s father, Bill Read, opened up about his family’s experience throughout her three-and-a-half-year legal saga in a candid new podcast interview.
His 45-year-old daughter faced murder and other charges in the Jan. 29, 2022, death of her then-boyfriend, John O’Keefe, a Boston cop whom prosecutors alleged she mowed down with a Lexus SUV and left to die in a blizzard. The defense argued that she had never struck him, police had conducted a faulty investigation, and someone else had killed him. After a mistrial, jurors the second time around found her not guilty of all homicide-related charges and found her guilty of driving under the influence of liquor.
Speaking with Billy Bush on his live show, “Hot Mics with Billy Bush,” the elder Read said he believes his daughter had been the target of a corrupt investigation from the start and that she wouldn’t have put up such a fight if she had had something to hide.
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Bill Read and his wife Jenny walk with their daughter Karen Read into Norfolk County Superior Court, Monday, May 19, 2025, in Dedham, Mass. Karen Read is charged with killing her Boston police officer boyfriend by intentionally driving her SUV into him. (Hans Pennink for Fox News Digital)
“I can tell you, as a parent, no parent, no loved one, no significant other in this life should go through what my wife and I and our daughter have gone through these three and a half years, so I say to everyone out there, take back your government,” Read said. “If you don’t like what your leaders are doing in the criminal justice system, get them out. Take back your government, because the next Karen Read could be you.”
The younger Read and O’Keefe spent the night of Jan. 28, 2022, drinking in Canton, Massachusetts. They went to two bars before driving to an after party at the home of another Boston cop named Brian Albert. Prosecutors and the defense disagree about what had happened after they had gotten there just after midnight. At around 6 a.m., Read and two friends returned to the address to find O’Keefe dead on the front lawn under a dusting of snow.
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Officer John O’Keefe poses for his official headshot. O’Keefe’s girlfriend, Karen Reed, is currently on trial for murder after he was found dead outside a Massachusetts home in January 2022. (Boston Police Department)
Police initially charged her with drunken driving manslaughter and fleeing the scene, but prosecutors later secured an indictment for the more serious charge of second-degree murder. Jurors ultimately cleared her of all of those allegations but agreed that she had drunk alcohol before getting behind the wheel.
“We’re very close. She is very candid. She’s very truthful, and had she hurt John O’Keefe, she told me, she said, Dad, ‘If I thought I hurt him, I’d own up to it. . . . But I did not strike him,'” the elder Read told Bush. “And I believed her.”
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If you don’t like what your leaders are doing in the criminal justice system, get them out. Take back your government, because the next Karen Read could be you.
Plus, he said, the state’s case was unconvincing and weak.
“When you just look at the evidence, the wounds to the body, the lack of damage to the car, and then couple that with the physics, the science, the medical testimony…” he said.
He took particular issue with the autopsy photos, and he said that’s what had prompted her to reach out to attorney Alan Jackson, the Los Angeles lawyer who added a jolt to her legal team at trial.
William Read gives his daughter Karen Read the thumbs up after court ended for the day for her second murder trial in Norfolk Superior Court on Wednesday, May 14, 2025, in Dedham, Mass. (Mark Chavous/Enterprise News via AP, Pool)
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“Karen Read is the engine, the transmission in this bus. She’s the fifth attorney,” her father said.
Imagine waking up every day in your 70s for 3 1/2 years knowing the people elected to serve you and assigned to protect you are trying to put your daughter in prison for life for something she did not do. That was Bill Read‘s reality.
Read, who went up to every sidebar with her lawyers at trial, already had a prominent Boston-area attorney, David Yannetti, when she brought in Jackson and Elizabeth “Liza” Little. For her second trial, she also added New York’s Robert Alessi.
Bush also asked Read about his own relationship with O’Keefe. Could he have seen him as a son-in-law if things got that far?
“I can’t say that,” he said, adding, “I liked the man.”
Karen Read talks with her attorneys Robert Alessi and David Yannetti during her trial at Norfolk Superior Court, Tuesday, May 6, 2025, in Dedham, Mass. (Matt Stone/The Boston Herald via AP, Pool)
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They really bonded over sports, he said.
“I saw John O’Keefe as really an athlete,” he said. “You could see his style throwing the football with him. You could see he had it in his blood.”
He also said that his daughter can’t have kids of her own but crafted a bond with O’Keefe’s niece and nephew, whom he had adopted after their parents died.
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Defense attorney Alan Jackson speaks to jurors during closing arguments in the murder trial of Karen Read, at right, in Norfolk Superior Court, Friday, June 13, 2025, in Dedham, Mass. (Mark Stockwell/The Sun Chronicle via AP, Pool)
“Karen was never going to be able to biologically have children, and I’m not sure that she would be necessarily one that would willingly embrace children. But those two children, she saw as an opportunity to provide a female presence in their life,” he said.
O’Keefe’s niece testified against his daughter at trial and is a plaintiff in the family’s wrongful death lawsuit against her.
But jurors still found too many holes in the state’s case.
“Imagine waking up every day in your 70s for 3 ½ years knowing the people elected to serve you and assigned to protect you are trying to put your daughter in prison for life for something she did not do,” Bush told Fox News Digital. “That was Bill Read‘s reality.”
Read received a year of probation for the drunken driving conviction. She is still facing a wrongful death lawsuit from O’Keefe’s family, which her civil defense team asked the court to dismiss earlier this month.
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Karen Read and John O’Keefe pose for an undated photograph. (Karen Read)
The case prompted the residents of Canton, Massachusetts, to demand an independent audit into their local police department, which found no evidence of a “conspiracy to frame” Read but faulted local police for a series of mistakes, including failure to photograph the victim’s body before it was moved, failing to lock down the crime scene and conducting witness interviews outside of headquarters.
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State police also launched an internal probe into the lead homicide detective, Michael Proctor, who was fired for sharing confidential information with civilians outside of law enforcement and drinking on the job. He is appealing his dismissal.
There was also a federal grand jury empaneled in the case, and one of the jurors pleaded guilty to leaking secret information earlier this week.